The Rise and Rise of Smartphone Photography

Smartphones have come a long way. Over the last few years, the improvements made in smartphone photography have been huge, culminating in the powerhouses on the market toda,y such as the Google Pixel 2, the iPhone X, and the Samsung Galaxy S9. My current handset, the Samsung S7 Edge, can take great-looking photos and even performs pretty well in low light, and this model is now over 2 years old! But despite it being a capable piece of photography kit, I rarely find myself using my S7 camera app for anything more than snapping an amusing piece of graffiti, or to show something to a friend. Then again, I also own 2 dedicated cameras.

E-M1 + LUMIX G 20/F1.7 @ 20mm, ISO 400, 1/20, f/1.7

My first system is a DSLR, which is my main go to camera if I’m going out to “do photography”. I also have a small Micro Four Thirds camera paired with mainly pancake lenses, which I can carry around in a tiny sling bag I have or in a coat pocket if I’m wearing one. I take this if I’m out with friends who aren’t into photography, or if I’m going somewhere I won’t be able to take a DSLR. This is the most likely situation where a smartphone would, but I still overwhelmingly prefer to use an actual camera in these situations.

Like many people, I will admit to being a bit of a gearhead – waiting for a new lens to be delivered is always pretty exciting. But my true passion is to get out and shoot with both cameras as much as I can. I like to think these are well-considered purchases that I made in order to get shots that I couldn’t capture before (and I think I’m mostly right on this)!

The iPhone Question

A friend recently asked me why I still keep on using cameras, and why I didn’t just get one of the latest smartphones. I mumbled some stuff about better image quality and controls, but it got me thinking. Why do I feel the need to keep investing in and using a dedicated camera system? At this point in 2018, almost everyone has a smartphone advanced enough to take decent shots, at least in good light. So, why do I feel I need more?

E-M1 + LUMIX G 14/F2.5 @ 14mm, ISO 400, 1/5, f/3.5

A smartphone is a camera system all in one. You don’t buy lenses for it, and it’s a one-off cost. In fact, you could see it as free, since you are buying a phone anyway. You can get additional apps to boost its functionality, some of which are actually free, and even the stock Camera apps for each OS are updated to become more feature-rich over time.

Most cameras, by contrast, are hardware products, released to market with a set of features which you are largely stuck with – that is, until the camera companies try to entice you with the latest models in their next release cycle. I realise some companies are bucking this trend: Olympus and Fuji have been pretty regular with firmware updates for their cameras, for example, adding new features rather than providing just fixing bugs. Another standout is Pentax, offering a rather unusual service when they released the K1 Mark II. For a fraction of the cost of the new Mark II, Mark I owners were able to send in their cameras to Pentax support and have them physically upgraded to the new model.

Another major advantage of the smartphone is the size and weight. Aside from perhaps the biggest phablets, they slip easily into a pocket or bag, and we carry them everywhere. Very few of us can claim this about our cameras. I have been dedicated to carrying around a large backpack for years on photography trips, which – depending on the equipment involved – can only provide room for my DSLR and 2-3 lenses.

Smartphones vs Dumb Cameras

There has long been the myth that a good camera means good pictures. It must be one of the biggest bugbears of a photographer to hear the ubiquitous line: “That’s a great picture – you must have an expensive camera!”

With better and better cameras inside the average person’s pocket, and with many people feeling the pinch economically, I think hiring a photographer with a “pro” camera is seen more and more as an unnecessary step or a luxury. With the main consumption of photographs occurring on smart devices, image quality is good enough, and photos taken from a phone can be shared easily and quickly with friends and family. It is also so easy to gain access to any image that you could want. A quick tap of a few keywords on Google Image Search brings up a wealth of different images to your fingertips, without having to pay anything (at least, to see the image), visit the host site, or even have an idea of where the photo came from.

A real eye-opener to the current situation is imagining how a teenager keen on photography would see the camera industry as it is today. Most teens in the western world have probably owned a smartphone for several years, share photos with their friends over WhatsApp or other apps, and are using photo-based social media sites such Snapchat and Instagram. They buy their first shiny new camera and get it home, excitedly tearing through the packaging to get to their new pride and joy inside.

Only to find that in-camera editing is clunky or non-existent, sharing photos means you have to physically connect your camera to a computer (or use an often badly designed Wi-Fi app), the menu system is a confusing 90s-computing-style maze of options, there’s no touch screen (or you can’t fully control some options with it), you can’t charge it with the same cable that you use to charge your other devices, and there are no or few regular updates with new features. A smartphone makes all of this so easy, and these features probably have an equal or even higher value than the extra image quality they might gain by using their new camera.

What Can’t the Smartphone Do?

There are still a few problems to solve before the likes of Google, Apple, and Samsung fully kill off the dedicated camera. I am primarily a wildlife photographer, and this is definitely an area the smartphone is finding difficult to invade. This type of photography hinges on having the necessary focal length reach to capture the animal in its environment, which works against the phone’s mantra of fitting in your pocket.

There is a new trend for multiple lenses on a phone camera, and a combination of these, some hefty image stabilisation algorithms, and some intelligent processing may one day be enough to emulate a workable 500mm lens, for example. Sports and action photography is also fairly safe for the time being, providing the sport you are shooting does not allow you to get close. Contrast detection autofocus and low light performance are improving quickly, with focal length being maybe the only major technical barrier here (not including the effort to get to or ability to access shooting locations!)

Applications like travel, family and day to day photography, however, are bread and butter for a smartphone. Entire weddings have been shot on phones, and this could easily translate into a number of other events too. Landscape photography is also not safe, with the usual wide-angle lens combined with some of the new built-in HDR or computational techniques threatening to do away with the traditional camera’s advantage.

The new portrait mode in the very latest flagships has helped to conquer another of the last camera bastions that have fallen to the smartphone: bokeh. The ability to generate blur behind a subject means that smartphone users can effectively take their own portraits. While it’s not perfect, this is only the first commercial pass at the technology, and, realistically, it’s only going to get more and more like the real thing. As I discovered recently, you can even get a stripped-down version of portrait mode with a number of older phones just by using the ‘Focus’ mode in Instagram’s app. Not as elegant in its execution, perhaps, but this will be enough for some people.

The other thing about a dedicated camera – and, in particular, the various DSLR systems – is the huge range of accessories that are on the market. This enables you to try out literally any type of photography you can think of. Something like astrophotography (which normally utilises an ultrawide lens or a modified camera to record infra-red light) or macro have not really been addressed by the smartphone as yet, but dedicated cameras can capture this sort of scene quite well. Lighting is also very well-catered on the DSLR, giving you mountains of different options, while devices like the iPhone are trying to render this lighting in software.

The Automatic Photographer

After some consideration, rather than image quality, I actually think the main reason I still carry a camera is the way it makes me feel. I love the feeling of getting out there with my kit and being totally in the moment, scanning my environment for the next shot – a unique point of view, the perfect moment to be captured. This is probably born of a pre-smartphone era upbringing, but I find it very hard to creatively get into this zone when using a smartphone. I realise that this is not the smartphone’s fault – probably more of a mental failing on my own part. I should, in theory, be able to create a fairly similar image on any camera, if we are to judge the creative vision over the technical quality. But that is how I feel nonetheless.

The other major appeal to using a dedicated camera is how it handles. I massively appreciate the wealth of physical controls at my fingertips, being able to creatively select the settings easily to craft the look I want. Ultimately, a phone feels like a gadget to me, not a camera. It doesn’t feel right in the hands, and I don’t feel like I am in control of what is going on, or that I am able to quickly adjust settings when the environment changes.

That being said, the latest smartphones such as the Google Pixel 2 are able to control most of the technical elements of taking a shot for you. Gone are the days where the photographer’s main job is to calculate an exposure. It can, for example, take multiple frames in quick succession automatically with different exposures and intelligently combine them, analysing the content of the image to render a high dynamic range scene with minimal noise and correct exposure across all areas of the image. All this from pushing a single button.

Think of what would be needed to achieve this with a camera. At the very least, you would need to go through your usual post-processing workflow, perhaps using Adobe Lightroom. Try to reclaim detail from either the highlights or the shadows, depending on what you exposed for. Maybe you would use filters, maybe you would bracket manually and use desktop software to combine these. Either way, this is a lot more work than a single button.

But there is still key human input needed. We need to choose the location, get to the location, and then carefully line up the frame until we see something pleasing. Only after that can we hit the shutter button, capturing the shot.

Still, what if even some of this could be automated? Imagine if the phone camera could analyse the scene based on a number of criteria and ratios and choose what it thinks is the “best” composition, at least from its current direction of view. The human user would merely need to hold up the phone and point it at some mountains, for the algorithms to take over – cropping down the view into a beautiful mountain scene, complete with leading lines, observation of the rule of thirds and all perfectly exposed.

In fact, what is to stop the algorithm tweaking reality for the sake of a more pleasing composition? We already have the tools to correct distortion, but what if algorithms could use these techniques to subtly change the view or perspective of the image to improve your picture? Or identify a moving car detracting from the tranquil beauty of a landscape and decide to remove it using image averaging techniques?

How long will it be until smartphones know how to compose a high-quality photo?

With current computational techniques in phones, I don’t believe this is too fantastical a concept. It is hard to for us to imagine a world in which composition, the fundamental creative aspect of photography, could be automated by a machine – but a parallel with music can be drawn here.

Machine Learning software has already been used in a project at the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris to emulate the chorales of the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Their machine, named DeepBach, was fed with a large amount of Bach’s music which could be used for analysis of the musical patterns, and then to validate the resulting composition. Out of 1600 participants, around half judged that a DeepBach composition was work by Bach himself, while 75% identified a piece from the composer himself as a human-written work.

If a machine can do this, why couldn’t we use similar technology to emulate the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson? If not now, then in the future. If smartphones had a feature like this, what would this do to the photography business?

The Future

Long term, I think that smartphones are going to be the primary camera for more and more people, and that “manually” taking photos with a DSLR or even mirrorless will become more niche. I am sure the camera industry will continue to progress, but I believe that with the majority of camera companies so focused on hardware over software, the focus needs to change to prevent cameras being left behind. A lot could be done to enhance the user experience of a camera. They could offer features that don’t automate as much as in smartphone technology, but still give the photographer more creative options than what is available today.

NIKON D750 + 200-500mm f/5.6 @ 700mm, ISO 800, 1/1000, f/8.0

Having said that, there will most likely be a group that is always gunning for the best image quality possible, be it for an amateur’s personal pride, or a pro working on a billboard campaign. For a lot of people, photography is a deep passion, and they will probably continue doing what they’re doing for now – myself included. But if a smartphone can automatically get you 80-95% of the way to the photo you’re trying to capture, how many people will deem that extra 20%, 10%, or 5% to be worth the investment in time and equipment?

Thank you to Photography Life reader Peter Cooper for this essay, written as part of the 2018 guest post contest! You can see more of Peter’s photos on his website.

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Comments

1) Shownomarcy

June 1, 2018 at 2:22 am

Interesting topic! I think the main point is that many of us are damn lazy and like comfortable ways! I dont use my mobile, but just because I have a cheap one. I need only the softwares it includes… (listening to music, access to my Nas). So I don’t (can’t) use it for photos or games. It’s true that mobile photos are getting better, but I think one main reason is that people like it, because maaany people are trapped within that (mostly) little mobile screen. So they would never see a photo on a bigger monitor. Most people dont even have a notebook or a pc. Mobile is ALL they have.

On the other hand I can see that photography is very popular and at certain events I can see many cameras. I thought it would be fun to go to a concert and shoot such a little events where are no pros. But even if the audience is like 15 ppl, 3 of them are photographers. So why should I be the 4th?

I knew that I wouldn’t carry a dslr. I bought an entry level mirrorless and really enjoy taking pictures I’ve never been able to.

I didn’t exactly grow up in the smartphone era but the first thing I used to take pictures, so to speak, with purpose, was indeed an s7 edge. I was perfectly happy with it and when sharing pics on instagram most people thought I used a dslr (then again, it’s instagram, but that’s still kind of telling) and when I decided to switch to a low-tier dslr I realised that I couldn’t ever go back to any smartphone to shoot pics with. One of the main reasons at the beginning was probably the most obvious: zoom. Starting off with a very unexceptional 18-105 kit lens, I was staggered by how much MORE I could do with it than I ever could with my phone. That alone sealed the deal for me (and even with all their software prowess zoom in phones is still utterly useless or cripplingly limited), without even considering all the disadvantages of working with such a tiny sensory, not being able to put a ND or polarising filter, having an actual aperture change and so on and so forth. Yes, for web consumption and for light tourism phones are fine, but, personally, I don’t take photographs with the sole intent of sharing them with as many people as possible and as quickly as possible. I take them first and foremost because I love doing it and if you love doing something you don’t want to be limited while doing it and so I use a dedicated camera rather than a phone, much like a gamer would use a dedicated rig rather than a 600€ laptop or an audiophile a dedicated dac, flac music files and low impedence headphones rather than a cheap phone, MP3s and some 20€ earphones. Smartphones will get better and better but even though dedicated camera bodies will probably shrink a bit more in popularity, I think they’ll still be there so long as there are people who love to take photographs to the best of their abilities.

This article does not agree with my experience. I have hoped to accomplish what you indicate in your article has already been done but have found that it is only partially possible. Four years ago on a cruise to Alaska I found that some of the still photos taken with my Motorola Maxx camera were almost indistinguishable from the still I got with my Nikon D3200. But four years later and two better Nikons and two top end iPhones and I am still working at getting photos out of the phone that are comparable to the DSLR. I currently have a Nikon D750 and iPhone X. I use Adobe LR and PS to edit. I also have a number of film cameras I still use. Plus Sony compact and crop sensor Nikon.

My own personal experience, and I shoot photos several times a week and during hikes on weekends, is that there is still significant room (actually vast room) for improvement in still photo ability in the latest iPhone X. That said I use the X all the time to take photos. It works very well at what it is good at. I like the connectivity of the iPhone. I like very much the ability to add camera apps to the phone. I wish you could do that with a DSLR. That said here are some of my experiences after many tests to improve my ability with the X and the 7 plus before it.

1. The standard Apple camera app only does jpeg. When you take pictures of things and places it auto processes your photos before you do anything to them. This is in many cases not a good thing. It adds a “golden” hue to the photos even if you don’t want that. It many times smears around the background of the image that is easy to see at any type of close up. Spot focus is a sometimes thing. I take lots of close ups and sometimes close focus is accurate and sometimes not. The Apple editing software on IOS or Mac is very limited. The presets except for Noir are terrible. The Apple camera app does to a good job on people shots if you like that “golden” hue. It is sort of like throwing tea over the image.

2. I solve many of the above Apple native camera app issues by using the Lightroom mobile camera app. You can shoot raw with this. For pictures of things and places you can get a neutral color and mostly non smeared image. The details are clearer doing this. But the Lightroom camera app does not focus as well as the native Apple app. It works pretty good on the wide angle camera but not that well on the tele. The Lightroom camera app does not do video, panos, image blur. The Lightroom editing software is super. It works much better when you use raw. Close up focus with the Lightroom camera app has the hit or miss issues of the Apple camera app.

3. The fake bokeh works OK on people shots. It does not work very well on most everything else. It does not look nearly as good as real bokeh. I have been able to get some good people shots with the Apple portrait app. The Apple camera app pano works pretty good. The apple camera app HDR works sometimes, but still usually blows out the clouds on a sunny day. The Adobe Lightroom camera app HDR does not work well at all.

4. Software tele does not look good compared to optical tele. This is obvious even with my Sony compact. The Sony gives much better tele results than the Apple. And this is the lower cost Sony HX-80 not the expensive RX-100.

5. I bought the Sony compact because I wanted a longer range optical zoom in a pocket camera. This is a great little camera that gives generally slightly better results than the iPhone. However, it does not do raw. A significant negative.

Just my opinion, but many of the things you attribute to smartphone computer smarts is actually the smartphone user smarts by working with the good live view you get on all the top end smartphones. You get good exposure with a smartphone because you look at the screen before you take the shot and fiddle with it to get it how you like it. In addition many of the added features in the last four years are distractions and don’t help the resulting images much.

A big issue with smartphone cameras is not being able to use filters like you can on a regular camera. Daytime full sun shots are much improved by using filters. And software simulations of filters don’t work as well. Not even close to working as well.

Final comments

1. In my opinion the size of the camera and sensor generally is proportional to the quality of the result. That has not changed much since Ansel Adams.

2. The number of people who have adjustable higher end cameras has always been small. Even 40 years ago there were lots more point and shoots than Nikon FMs, FEs, or F3s. Any prediction that actual cameras is going away is premature and unlikely. I suspect that there are many people like me who spent money and time trying to accomplish what your article says is already done but have come away frustrated with the results. I would love it if I could fit all the power of my D750 in my pocket. No such device currently is sold at any price.

My iPhone does a decent job in situation in good light situation, i.e. outdoor daylight. Samsung Galaxy 9 and other android phones performed similarly. One can hardly argue the convenience factor and they are easy to use. The image quality continues to improve as their sensors get bigger. But that is a long way to go…

However, there are many situations in low lighting and action situation where DSLR are more suitable. I photograph my kids’ indoor dance performance or musical recitals where fast and accurate autofocus are required (flash is prohibited). That is where the full frame sensor bodies excel while getting sharp images with little/no noise at high ISO >6,400 after post-processing. Besides the image quality, the ability to lock, track focus and capturing images at 10 or more frames per second is literally priceless. Even with mid-level full frame sensor bodies, these capabilities are available to many photographers. I also photograph outdoor sports where fast AF is required.

Like you I wish to have all these capabilities reduce to a small portable device, but that is impossible given the laws of physics. And the number of available photons is always fixed and the device must somehow convert them into quality images.

Comparing photography with the music industry one could say a high resolution picture taken with dedicated camera equipment is the music as it sounds in a concert hall, the picture taken with a phone is what you hear via your car radio. The reality is that 99% of the music is listened via the car radio (or something comparable) but the luckily concert hall will never disappear.

I think what frustrates me more than anything else these days is how my wife’s IPhone often seems to take a better more natural looking photo, with better dynamic range, than my D810 and all my expensive lenses. But I get no enjoyment taking pictures with a phone camera.

Don’t shoot the messenger, but the Nikon’s high pixel dSLR cameras are challenging to shoot well. In my experience, most using them would have been better served by a D750, as they don’t need all those pixels. And, shooting a camera with this kind of pixel pitch WELL, is much more demanding than most other dSLR cameras. I’ve had the D800, D810 and now the D850 – and I use it the least, compared to D5, D500, or the D750. It is great when used to it’s strengths and when used with lenses that don’t hinder the level of detail it can capture.

When the D800 was first released, it was amazing how quickly people started reporting that lenses that were previously understood as “sharp” were all of a sudden more lack luster – when used in front of the D800.

Back to topic – what device a person uses to capture really comes down to what they expect of themselves in the pics they take AND what they want to do with those images. Each tool has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Picking the one that serves best in each different situation is the challenge. Picking well allows more room for joy and contentment in the process.

well photography is basically about light and composition. lense and sensor are about light and human plus lense is about composition. the mobiles are limited by the lense frequency and sensor size, still giving some remarkable results. the dslr or mirror-less offer normally bigger sensor and frequency variety. we can compare the results of mobile with some from dslr but are having limits of lense frequency and other many choices. simply mobile phones are basically phones with camera and cameras are only cameras.

A Canon pocket camera bought in 2012 to try to use as “the camera with me” was quickly pushed out of business by a half-decent smartphone, but that’s a long way from replacing the dslr or even a bridge camera. There are some good inexpensive phone apps for controlling larger cameras, peripherals, or calculating DOF and other technicals. For example, a developer TS Systems recently posted a new app “Focal Finder” that sets the phone camera to mimic (obviously without the image quality) in the field dslr composition with different focal lengths for optimal lens selection, including presets for the user’s own lens kit – clearly a handy concept for previewing a shooting location or stumbling across an interesting place to visit later, without lugging a bag of unnecessary equipment or wasting time on shooting without the right lens for the job.

Phones have definitely come a long long way in image quality and high ISO handling. Noise will be visible if you zoom in, but for instagram sized photos, it’s nearly imperceptible and makes for a tack sharp photos. Great video as well with much better stabilization and focus.

My main gripe with them is not being able to just grab a hold of one and press a button and have a photo taken. I have to swipe up, choose what mode I want to shoot in, press the button, then wait for it to find focus before putting it away. And that is if my hand isn’t a bit sweaty, or wet, or inside a glove, of it I’m not having an off day in my finger interaction.

I prefer to snap quick unposed photos while on my vacations or excursions, so that physical button and standby mode and knobs to adjust a few settings for me is still valuable.

There’s other stuff too, like sharp zoom shots from my Nikon 300mm f4 prime, and the main reason I got into SLRs is just the amount of detail they still capture over a phone. I like to review photos on a 24″ screen and see every little hair on someone’s face. It’s more engrossing to me and takes me back to the time.

Great article! I started photography using my Father’s Leica IIIf. I progressed to Nikon(Nikkormat ft3 to Nikon 3f and 8008 ) and then moved into digital. Four years ago I got a Samsung Galaxy S6 and everything else went into storage.(I understand the inability to do nature photography. I’m not a nature photographer) I consider the smart phone camera to be the 21st century equivalent of the introduction of the Leica prototype in the early 20th century. If Alfred Eisenstaedt were alive today, he would be seen using an IphoneX or Galaxy S9.

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